Lolly Willowes (Virago Modern Classics)

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Yet the fantasy element in Warner’s writing – touched by the fleeting and the feral – includes much we might now think of as queer; and much that in the delineation of individualised sexualities rejects the normative assumptions of patriarchal society.

From 1917 she was in regular employment as one of the editors of Tudor Church Music, [7] ten volumes published by Oxford University Press in the 1920s with the support of the Carnegie UK Trust. Rambling became a focus point for the promotion of appropriate landscape behaviours, with pamphlets warning against littering, the picking of wild flowers and damage to footpaths. Titus's renewed social and domestic reliance on Laura make her feel frustrated that even living in the Chilterns she cannot escape the duties expected of women. The two women became committed members of the Communist Party, and in 1937, they travelled together to Spain during the Civil War to try to stop the spread of Fascism.No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. As darkness falls over Dannie, ‘a nameless ecstasy and excitement seemed to be rising up all around’; leaving New Easter, Sukey senses ‘something urgent and secret in the appearance of this landscape, so full of movement, so denuded of colour’ (TH, 51, 90). She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. It suggests that Warner invests in potentialities of what Sara Ahmed analyses as ‘disorientation’, and that in her nuanced evocations of sexual deviance, landscapes become a prompt for the discursive construction of queer subjectivities. The critical and personal hostility that greeted the jointly authored Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933 effectively put an end to the public poetic careers of both Warner and Ackland.

The end of World War I also coincided with the demands for independence of many former British colonies, including India and Britain’s close neighbor, Ireland.In addition to fiction, Warner wrote anti-fascist articles for such leftist publications as Time and Tide and Left Review. Yet the strangeness of the landscape excites her, and she is drawn to ‘its secret longing’, ‘the hour when the sea-fog would come flowing over it, billowing in like the sea’s ghost come back to claim its own’ (TH, 21).